Imagine a robot that doesn’t require steel or hard plastic. Imagine a robot that can wrap its lifting device around an irregular shaped object and conform to it’s shape for a secure grip. I can imagine all sorts of “soft” robot applications for this.

For instance, how about a robotic prosthetic arm allowing a mother who lost her arm to hug her child? Rescue robots that can pluck up people or animals from places without fear of further injuring the person or animal?

Addressing a gathering at the Huntsville Christian Academy in Huntsville, Ala., on Sunday night, the former judge suggested that he was investigating his accusers, threatened to sue The Washington Post and called on the United States to restore its culture by going “back to God.”

So, he is having your accusers investigated, eh? So far his claim is that these women didn’t voluntarily come forward, they were hunted down by the Washington Post reporters and lobbied to tell their story so they shouldn’t be believed.

Neither Corfman nor any of the other women sought out The Post. While reporting a story in Alabama about supporters of Moore’s Senate campaign, a Post reporter heard that Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls. Over the ensuing three weeks, two Post reporters contacted and interviewed the four women. All were initially reluctant to speak publicly but chose to do so after multiple interviews, saying they thought it was important for people to know about their interactions with Moore.

And this is suppose to make their stories less credible? Shoot, it makes them more credible to me. You want to know what else gives them credibility? A little gossip provided by Teresa Jones, one of Moore’s former colleagues in the Gadsden DA’s office:

“It was common knowledge that Roy dated high school girls. Everyone we knew thought it was weird,” former Etowah County deputy district attorney Teresa Jones told CNN national correspondent Alexander Marquardt. “We wondered why someone his age would hang out at high school football games and the mall. But you really wouldn’t say anything to someone like that.”

Betsy Davis, who remains friendly with Corfman and now lives in Los Angeles, says she clearly remembers Corfman talking about seeing an older man named Roy Moore when they were teenagers. She says Corfman described an encounter in which the older man wore nothing but tight white underwear.

Dang! This is almost as embarrassing of a loss as Hillary Clinton losing to Donald Trump!

The race focused on traffic and other local issues in suburban Prince William County but also exposed the nation’s fault lines over gender identity. It pitted a 33-year-old former journalist who began her physical gender transition four years ago against a 13-term incumbent who called himself Virginia’s “chief homophobe” and earlier this year introduced a “bathroom bill” that died in committee.

UPDATE – 15:55pm:News outlets are now reporting that Devin Patrick Kelley had in-laws or ex-in-laws that attended this church and that he did kill his grandmother-in-law, Lula White. So maybe we do know what switched the chip in his head.

According to Geldof, he wrote the song after reading a telex report at Georgia State University‘s campus radio station, WRAS, on the shooting spree of 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer, who fired at children in a school playground at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, US on 29 January 1979, killing two adults and injuring eight children and one police officer. Spencer showed no remorse for her crime and her full explanation for her actions was “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day”. The song was first performed less than a month later.

That opening line has always had me thinking this may be the only answer we have to explain all the mass shooting events that seem to be happening with greater frequency. From Charles Whitman, to Brenda Ann Spencer, to Stephan Paddock to Devin Patrick Kelley and all the one’s in between something inside their head got switched.

In Whitman’s suicide note he stated:

I imagine it appears that I brutally killed both of my loved ones. I was only trying to do a quick thorough job […] If my life insurance policy is valid please pay off my debts […] donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type […] Give our dog to my in-laws. Tell them Kathy loved “Schocie” very much […] If you can find in yourselves to grant my last wish, cremate me after the autopsy.

So as I read stories about yesterday’s mass killing at that Texas church the only common thread I see is a deeply troubled person who apparently had a switch inside their head flip to overload. This time it took 26 lives and injured more.

As investigators try to determine a motive, they are also probing how the attacker obtained his gun. Kelley had sought a license to carry a gun in Texas but was rejected, Abbott said.

“By all of the facts that we seem to know, he was not supposed to have access to a gun, so how did this happen?” Abbott said in an interview on CNN. “We are in search of answers to these questions.”

I suppose we can get rid of guns, and I mean get rid of them and not just outlaw them, and possibly drastically reduce deaths but that silicon chip is still going to be in some individual’s head and it will switch to overload again. We need to understand how that chip gets there because there are other ways that flipped switch can harm large numbers of people.

Every year I have several friends diagnosed with cancer of one form or another and every year I lose someone I know well to cancer of one form or another. I know I’m not alone in this experience.

It makes me feel helpless so just to give me a little bit of a feeling I can do something I do. I grow a beard in November and throw a donation to the Matthew Hill Foundation in their No-Shave November fund raising drive.

Nearly half of cancer diagnoses and deaths are preventable. No-Shave November’s mission is to not only raise funds for cancer research and treatment but to educate the population about preventative measures.

Each day, 22,000 people die from cancer worldwide (WHO). There’s a good chance that someone you know and love will be affected by this disease. Nearly half of cancer diagnoses and deaths are preventable. No-Shave November’s mission is to not only raise funds for cancer research and treatment but to educate the population about preventative measures.

I’m sure all of you have heard by now that Paul Manafort has been indicted for money laundering Russian money. Okay, Ukrainian money from a pro-Russian Ukrainian group which is semi-laundered Russian money.

But that’s really nothing when it comes to tying in the Trump campaign to collusion with Russians. The real kicker here isn’t Manafort, it’s George Papadopoulos. He’s the one who has plead guilty to charges of lying to federal prosecutors about his personal collusion with a Russian.

According to court papers released Monday, those contacts included an unnamed overseas professor whom Papadopoulos met in Italy in March, the same month he joined the campaign. In April 2016, the professor told him the Russian government had “dirt” on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, including thousands of Clinton’s emails.

Both Manafort and Papadopoulos are on fire but Manafort’s fire started way before the Clinton campaign. Papadopoulos’ fire started right as he joined the campaign. I’m thinking that fire spreading to at least Donald Trump Jr. will be fairly easy to prove with Mr. Papadopoulos’ help.

A big complaint by anti-immigration advocates is that our constitution gives citizenship to anyone born in this country regardless of the citizenship of their parents. They claim this creates anchor babies. The Trump administration came into office on its promise to stem illegal immigration and fight against abortions. To do one they have to allow for an anchor baby which the mother doesn’t want.

Hershman is right, there is absolutely discrimination against whites out there somewhere but whatever discrimination there is is being done by people who can’t hold back whites with their discrimination at a level that causes no harm to whites other than someone’s feelings getting hurt occasionally.

New York City has a traffic congestion problem so the mayor is stepping up enforcement against e-bikes which are very effective at relieving congestion.

Speaking at a press conference yesterday on the Upper West Side, the epicenter of NYPD e-bike enforcement, de Blasio said the crackdown is part and parcel of his administration’s goal to eliminate traffic fatalities. “Vision Zero is about making us safe regardless of what the threat is — making us safer when it comes to our streets,” de Blasio said.

But he admitted that e-bike riders had not actually caused any fatalities — the enforcement is based on complaints.

According to David Abulafia, the term “Peleshet” signifies foreigner or wanderer. In biblical Hebrew they become Pelishtim; in Greek, their land become Palaistina, whence the terms Palestine and Philistine.[8]